


I Want, I Want

by jazzfic



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 06:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Peeta learns to close his eyes and manage the fight again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Want, I Want

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the F4LLS fundraising compilation. Thank you to trippy41 for beta reading.

Here at night it's really only the small tremors humming beneath the floor and through the walls that remind me we're actually moving. Otherwise this train is more or less invisible, a metal tube I wander the length of, up one way and back the other, revelling in repetition. My fingers trail the silvery bulkhead and my eyes follow the disjointed steps of my feet, steel and skin, projecting the sort of sleep I'm too afraid to succumb to. Because of what it brings, and what it takes from me. 

Tonight it brings fire. I am in the cave, prone on my back, watching a tree through the gap in the rock. It has caught alight and split into three. Katniss is there, of course, running, but not towards me. She's running from Cato, a messy, faceless figure that looks nothing like him but moves with a form I recognise from the training house. He has followed her from the Cornucopia, and reaches her heels as she scrambles upward into the branches. I see his mouth open, his head roll back to shout in fury and light up the tree as if it were a brittle skeleton. I recall absently wondering where he had been hiding that skill because it's an impressive one. Maybe I ask the question, yell it from the cave while Katniss burns. Maybe it doesn't matter. It's just like any other night, and I wake trembling with guilt and self-hatred. I crash out into the corridor and feel that movement underfoot. 

Just like any other night, when I lose her again. 

I know a pattern when I see one. In a roundabout way, however violent, however passionate, I lose her every time I close my eyes. It's only by pushing my body past her door, stopping and placing my hands on it, that I feel her coming back again. I don't always succeed. The nightmares that aren't, the ones featuring a different Katniss, a future Katniss, those I never remember. But for the part where I jerk into consciousness with the sheets pooled at the foot of the bed. With the crude evidence of my arousal painful and hard against the mattress and my stomach fluttering weakly. I can't leave in that state, so I don't. I bite my lip and let the rest happen however it's meant to. It's never meant to. Never. I feel sick afterward, and the breakfast we sit down to later is endured quietly. I don't look her in the eye.

We spend the day in District 3. Effie and Haymitch spend it arguing, barely hidden whispers spliced with grave looks in our direction. I try to ignore it, but when night falls and Katniss mumbles an excuse and escapes to her room, I'm left with Haymitch's tired eyes on me. So instead of following her, I take the glass he holds out and sit down again. 

“Does she know?” he asks me.

The inch of liquor is the color of the burnt caramel we practically inhaled after dinner, neither of us tasting it, but both of us _so badly_ wanting the hot sweetness after a day of so much cold that it almost became need. The texture had pricked at my tongue and made me think of holding a flame over a pool of sugar, watching it crisp and turn to gold. _Brulee_ , the recipe books call it. A dessert my father had a weakness for, and one I could turn out in my sleep. 

I don't sleep for those sort of things any more. I doubt I ever will again.

Ignoring the drink is easy; it seems right now I have a greater thirst for staring Haymitch down. “Know what?” I ask back. We'll do this dancing around the conversation game all night if that's what he wants. I don't care. It'll only be a variation on everything that's come before. Can't be any worse, just as it can't be any better. “That I have it as bad as she does? We haven't had that particular talk yet, Haymitch, sorry.” I raise my glass in his direction. “But don't worry. I'll let you know the moment we do.” 

I think he's going to press more, but he only gives me a look of watery distain and works his body out of the chair. “Okay, kid,” he says with a sigh. “You do that.” He refills his drink, and I watch the back of his blue shirt, undone at the belt and carrying a stain that has probably been there since breakfast. Both it and its wearer disappear into the shadow beyond the sliding door. The silence he leaves behind does a good job of smothering the weak response I'm forced to bite down. I don't need the reminder that whatever I'm feeling Haymitch has had a hundred times worse for years. I could probably just blink and he'd glean some sort of understanding from it. And I'd hate it if it weren't so true.

I sit alone for a while then go to my room because my thoughts aren't good company tonight. The shower is tepid, partly from my bleary fumbling at the controls and partly because I'm wary of overheating, of blood agitated and hugging the surface. Excitement I don't want, but my body no doubt will latch onto given a second's hesitation. I pull on sleep pants and a t-shirt from a pile of identical t-shirts I find folded and clean in my top draw. For half a minute I stand there looking at the clothes I've been given, at the laundry I didn't do, the organising I didn't have to think about. Like the dessert I had no part in making but for the memory it left me of my father; I want to tip them all onto the floor, make a ruin of them for the fact that I'm part of something I have no say in. That every night leaves me with dreams I never ask for. 

I want a lot of things I don't get. I'm seventeen and traumatised, for fuck's sake. I can be selfish, too. 

My bed holds me for exactly twenty minutes before I'm up and walking again. As pathetic as it sounds, that's close to a new mark for me, though as triumphs go it's a pretty empty one. Tonight her voice carries and carries, and like all the times before I badly want to shut it out. But it's as if I've reached the edge of something, so there's no second thought at all when I go straight to her door and step inside. A flash of the landscape that's no more than a streak of dusk melting into the forest makes a brief impression as I stumble forward and kneel onto the bed. She's almost invisible in the dark, just an indistinct shape in a whirl of blankets. A raw, keening sound comes from her throat, echoed by the thud thump of her feet as they kick out against the wall. She doesn't see me. 

A debate rushes through my head for barely a heartbeat before I make a decision. When my hand touches her she twists away and cries out. It's the sound Cato made as the mutt with Rue's eyes downed her teeth into his gut. 

I want to cry. I can't save her from this, I can't.

“Katniss.” My voice is pitiful. I move closer, reaching for her again. “Katniss...”

I don't know what breaks, if it's her, if it's me, but at some point our fingers lock together and our voices rise to a peak and then we freeze. When I feel everything slacken and can hear nothing but our breathing, I reach for the light switch and find her staring up at me, shaking bodily. Wet knots of hair cling to her face and neck. The sourness in the air is something I know only too well from my own nightmares. I don't want to scare her, so I try to move away, except I can't; her grip tightens again and suddenly she's burying herself into my side and murmuring my name and _this_ , this I know. This is recognition, relief. This is a brief, terrible high at being finally torn from the worst black horror: Katniss caught in the fire and the falling tree, and instead of me in that cave it's Prim, her father, Gale. It's the Thresh from a different life who we might have been friends with. Maybe she's seeing herself. Maybe it's none of those things. I can't know and I won't ever ask, not until she tells me. Just getting this far is enough.

It's a long time before the shaking stops. I stay as still as I can, then edge close until my arms are around her and we're back in the same position we clung to in the arena. The real one, I mean. I feel it's important to distinguish that, as laughable as it sounds. 

Time passes, I don't know how long. Then: “You're here,” she says. Her voice breaks, tears spill. She buries her head into my chest. “I was – Peeta – ”

“Shh.”

My first instinct is to say it doesn’t matter, but that's a lie. It matters. It probably won't ever be okay. I push the hair from her face and automatically brush my lips to the places they expose – the plump swell of her cheek, her brow, and the tip of her ear. Accidental touches, all of it helpless. I have to find a way to pause before I forget myself, so I listen to her breathing as it catches and slows; I see her eyes flit across to mine and she smiles, just a little. “Sorry,” I say. I move back and look down to where my other hand rests lightly on her hip. I curl my fingers and feel the dampness of her skin, slick beneath the cotton of her top. I'm conscious of every part of her, every part of my body. I can't go there; I look away, gather up the comforter and pull it over her.

“No, don't be.” She's quiet for a while, staring down the length of the bed, to where my one good leg sticks out. I watch her and wriggle my toes. “I heard you, you know. I mean – I hear you. Every night. You walk and walk and I look at that door and wonder why you don't...but then I'm gone, and it's too late...” She trails off. I feel something tighten in my chest. Katniss bites her lip and our eyes meet. “I wouldn't have minded,” she says softly. Her voice is barely there; she's on the verge of falling. “I won't ever mind, Peeta. I mean that.”

I think of Haymitch, the things he never tells me because he doesn't need to. I picture Katniss in the sleeping bag, the smell of lamb stew in her hair while rain fell at the mouth of the cave. Our lips trembling when we touched, failing to kiss in the way we were supposed to. I didn't know half of it then, the whys of her, what drove that Katniss to move outside and beyond the needs of her family. Wondering at what point that desire struck out to include our survival, ours, to encompass me. And how ridiculous it was, and still is, to fear loving her would stop if we were to ever play the same game again. 

“You should sleep,” I say. 

Her shoulder kneads into mine. “Can you?”

“Sleep?” It seems to take forever for my brain to process her words. I can only look back and shrug. “I don't think so.” 

“Do you want to talk?” 

She's asking the questions I should be asking her. I'm going about this the wrong way, backwards, face down, like I'm still watching the oddness of my footsteps. I try to paste on an expression that's reassuring, and shake my head again, no.

And there's the problem. We're masters of the same skill. Her camouflage is the one threaded in and around her own feelings. But it's sparse, I can see through the holes. 

“Then what does that leave us?” she asks carefully. “Lie here and...nothing?”

I could make a mess of things now, a real mess, so I exhale and run a hand over my face, as if we're back to discussing recipes. This twigs something and I smile despite myself. “If we were home, I'd go bake and – eat none of it.”

“In your big empty house?”

She's trying to smile, I can tell, so I lean in gently, my pretend frown all for her. “Yeah. Big old rattling house. In big old empty Victor's Village.”

“Baking, hmm. You're very original, Peeta Mellark.”

I wind my fingers through hers. “Thank you.” Her skin looks raw, like she's been scrubbing hard under very hot water. I wait until she notices the silence and looks over at me. “I thought we weren't going to talk,” I say.

“Not...it's not that sort of talking. I don't have to think about what I'm going to say with you, like this. It's different.” Katniss pulls her hand away and sighs, frustration edging into her voice now. “Maybe I will sleep,” she says.

I nod, turning my eyes away. Eventually her breathing steadies. I try to picture how many lengths of the train I might have made if I hadn't opened her door. There's no way I can do that again, knowing what she wanted and what I could have given her all along. Her cheek rests on my upper arm, and I feel her breath warm a tiny patch of my shirt. As slowly as I can I settle down properly, attempting to move so my prosthetic isn't rubbing against my good leg, or her. But I find I can't, her feet are pushed against mine and tangled in between steel and plastic. That, and the rest of me, so I stop trying. When I'm certain she's asleep I kiss her forehead. It's clumsy, small. I feel like I'm hovering and looking at another me who's making all the right moves, and I want to applaud that person because it sure as hell's not the kid who wanders through trains like a ghost. I've had a long time to get this wrong. 

Or – 

Or I could just be this Peeta, now, help Katniss and help myself, love her if that's all I have, and quit the wanting. 

We can hate what we're made to do, but that's not to say we can't build on what's left behind. 

I shut my eyes, only meaning to rest for a bit. When I open them again light is streaming through the window, a blue-grey wedge of forest like a just begun sketch wavering in an uneven line above the frame of glass. Katniss is awake, and watching me, and there's no prompting to the way we smile at each other. It just happens. I murmur some nonsense good morning that seems mostly inadequate, and she turns away so her face is hidden behind her hair and I can't see her expression. I do hear her reply, though, and it's just as small and silly as mine. She's close, warm, and disarmingly pretty. 

I feel suddenly that's it's very important to keep this moment going as long as I can before we have to drag ourselves up and face the rest of the day. So I clamber out as if to feign a stretch, and casually drag the bedding away with me, the whole of it all the way off the mattress. 

Just as I'd hoped there's a yelp from behind and I turn, grinning.

“Peeta!”

She's kneeling on the bed, stubbornly holding onto the corner of sheet that's pulled taught between us. I bite my lip and give my end a tug. I'm expecting a war of wills but to my surprise Katniss lets go and I promptly tumble backwards, my momentum so sudden that when I collide with the dresser it jerks with a bang against the wall. I hear my name again and then she's up and by my side, hands floating over my arms as I hold myself upright, poised in an awkward balancing act. “I didn't think you were...pulling on so tight,” she says, a little helplessly. 

“Well. I guess that'll wake everyone up.” 

Our eyes meet. I think the openness of our situation hits us both at the same time. I'm trying very hard not to glance at her shorts, or further down, to where the long shape of her legs tease my peripheral vision. Katniss parts her lips then presses them together again. Indecision hovers between us, and just when I think she's going to move away she exhales quickly and weaves her arms around me. She's shivering. I touch a hand to her hair and speak gently. “Katniss, I'm okay.” But she doesn't move. If anything her grip tightens. I don't know what else to do, so I accept the hug for what it is and try not to think of anything beyond that. 

Eventually Katniss steps away and moves back to throw the covers onto the bed. “If they heard that, we're...ugh. We're going to be looked at and get such a talking to,” she says, with a sigh. 

“Hey. I don't care.” I join her and straighten a pillow half-heartedly. Outside the trees have gone – all I see are buildings, rows and rows of block-like shapes seemingly going on for miles. “Let them talk. It's our business.”

She doesn't reply. I can almost hear the Capitol laughing at me from here. The few seconds of quiet as we occupy ourselves with the bed stretches to a minute and then another, until I'm standing there and she's standing there and we're neither of us watching the view, or each other, or anything really. I rub my hands over my face and make towards the door. 

“See you at breakfast?” 

I don't mean it as a question since what else are we going to do, really, but my voice lifts at the end and maybe it's this that prompts the tiny smile to appear on her lips. Her hand lifts in a small wave. I smile, copying her, and leave the room.

Katniss is right. Half an hour later, there are eyes on us at the table, eyes that are plenty knowing, boring into us as we sip hot chocolate and wait for the talk of the day to begin. While Effie's chief concern appears to be Katniss's bitten down nails, it's Haymitch I feel examining me, and it almost has me reacting, almost – but for Katniss. I stay as she does, quiet, still. I'm committed to this as I am to her. 

“Bad night?” he asks, at last breaking eye contact to direct his soured gaze into the dark surface of his coffee. 

I raise my chin, lifting one shoulder into a shrug as if I haven't a care in the world. “Aren't they all?” Then before either of them can respond I turn to Katniss. “Take these apricots off me, please, or else I'm going to stuff myself full,” I say to her. The wall I put up means Haymitch has no choice but to listen to the lecture Effie has launched into about stimulants and why he should be drinking something herbal instead, because after all, a nice complexion won't ever come from bad habits! I eat, feeling no triumph.

Effie's speech ends with a sigh. “Look out there,” she says, shaking her head glumly. “Just look and think of the pleasant, civil conversation we might have had with this lovely backdrop before us. But instead here I am having to remind you, Haymitch Abernathy, of things you should well know by now. As if I don't have enough on my plate as it is, my goodness, I _cannot_ be the only one setting a shining example.”

I almost tell her that our nightmares are out there, too, running to keep up; that we're faster, this humming train. How I now know what I want, which is to see them left behind.

Instead my hand drops beneath the table. I'm searching for Katniss, but she's there already, and her fingers are first to find mine. I hold to her as if we were asleep again.


End file.
